“But when the attendants delivered the king’s command, Queen Vashti refused to come. Then the king became furious and burned with anger.” — Esther 1:12 (NIV)
The book of Esther begins with a party. A very long party. King Ahasuerus of Persia hosted a banquet that lasted a hundred and eighty days, a six-month display of the wealth and glory of his empire, followed by a seven-day feast for all the people of Susa. The details are precise: gold and silver couches on a mosaic pavement of porphyry, marble, mother-of-pearl, and costly stones. Wine in golden goblets. A different design for each one. Royal wine flowing in abundance, as befitting a king. This was excess on a scale that is almost impossible to imagine, and it is the opening scene of the most carefully providential story in scripture.
Why does it matter? Because God placed the hinge of an entire people’s survival on the outcome of a royal dinner party.
On the seventh day, the king was merry with wine and commanded that Queen Vashti be brought before him wearing her royal crown, to show the peoples and the princes her beauty. She was beautiful, and he wanted to display her. It was an act of entitled vanity by a man drunk on his own wealth and wine. Queen Vashti refused to come. The text does not tell us why. Perhaps she found the command degrading. Perhaps she had her own gathering of women and would not leave it. Perhaps she simply had enough dignity to say no to a humiliating public display.
Whatever her reason, the refusal set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in the survival of an entire people. The king’s advisors persuaded him that Vashti’s refusal was a threat to the authority of every husband in the empire, that if word spread that the queen had defied the king, women throughout the provinces would despise their husbands. Vashti was deposed. A search was begun for a new queen. And into that vacancy, created by a man’s vanity and a woman’s dignity, stepped a Jewish orphan who had no reason to be in any palace in the Persian Empire.
Think about the ordinary events in your own story that turned out to be hinges. The cancelled meeting that led to the conversation that changed your direction. The redundancy that felt like disaster and turned out to be reassignment. The relationship that ended badly and whose ending created space for the one that was actually meant for you. The door that closed in your face by someone acting out of selfishness or carelessness or pride who had no idea they were serving a purpose they would never have chosen to serve.
The ordinary events of our lives are not interruptions to God’s plan. They are the plan. God does not only work through burning bushes and parted seas. He works through the vanity of a Persian king and the dignity of a woman whose name means excellence. He works through the small decisions that people make for entirely human reasons, and He weaves them into a tapestry that, seen from the right distance, is unmistakably His.
Today, look at what has felt most ordinary in your life this week. The small events, the minor frustrations, the unremarkable decisions of the people around you. Ask God to show you whether any of them are the first scene of a chapter of providence you have not yet been able to read. He is more present in the ordinary than we typically give Him credit for. He was in chapter one of Esther before anyone had met Esther.
Prayer
Father, train me to see your providence in the ordinary. The parties, the refusals, the small decisions of people around me who are acting for entirely human reasons but serving a purpose they cannot see. I have been waiting for the dramatic before I will call something your work. Teach me to recognise you in the mundane. In Jesus’ name, amen.
